Eight million dollar Super Bowl commercial. A-list stars, 3D-level effects work, three minutes long and, for the first time ever, a real boob shot. Not an android boob. Full warm nipple. Every American on the planet tuned into that commercial-- “Ma, get in here, they’re showing it!” --then it went dark. Tak Brazton shot a plasma hole in his TV and answered the phone on the first ring. “Pandora event, Brazton,” the man with the English accent and fist permanently up his ass said. “What’s your situation?” “Having sex and watching TV. Just blasted the TV.” “Then I suggest the other hole and your ass in gear two seconds afterward.” Brazton shifted to quarterback position. “Hauling ass.” He clicked off. “That’s so tacky, Braz,” said Miranda, his London liaison. “And the TV? Grow the hell up.” “You kill the rhythm when you talk, Panda. Shit just got real. Gonna need you to focus.” Tak Brazton interrupted two things for sex: the Super Bowl was one. America was next. Fortunately he was in Britain. ~~~ “Somebody want to tell me in proper English why the hell I ran over seven brains with tails on my way here?” “The en route briefing—” “The en route briefing was shit. Where’d they drop in first?” “The Americas.” “Son of a bitch.” Super Bowl Sunday. Son of a bitch. Brazton pulled his shit together. Just then a tight lab coat escorted a pair of breasts into Pidsby’s office. Lenore Tidsby, the only woman who’d ever made Tak Brazton cry in bed. Twice. She slapped her father’s desk with a stack of papers then swept a lock of red hair back in formation. “Sir.” “Everybody knows that’s your father, Lenore,” said Tak. “Shut the hell up, Brazton. Sir, these things are dropping fast. Every continent.” “Not like the T was fooling anybody,” said Brazton. “Shut the hell up, Brazton. No one’s done any calculations, sir, but at the rate these are falling the entire planet will be infested in two days.” “Dammit!” said Major Pidsby. “Dammit all,” breathed Tak. “All the way to hell,” nodded Lenore. She slapped a second stack of papers no one had seen her holding. “Nothing is killing them fast enough.” She leaned on the desk, eyes steely. She had promised herself she’d never speak these words again, not after what happened last time, what happened between her and Rex Sadim, the man who had driven her to Tak’s arms after Tak had had to behead him for trying to take a bite out of her arm, that brilliant man who had become what he’d become for science. She leaned forward even more. Tak glanced down her blouse. “We need zombies.” Pidsby glanced nervously between his daughter and Tak. “Do you think that’s…wise?” “Yes, father,” she said, dropping the pretense in this desperate hour, “I loved a zombie. I loved him in all the ways a woman can love.” She cupped herself through the labcoat. “I gave him these and more, and …and yes, I will love again.” “And you, Tak?” asked Pidsby. Tak cupped his crotch. “I loved him like a brother,” he said vehemently. He leaned forward too, his crotch against Pidsby’s desk, oak to walnut, a promise traveling the length of his length to the very foundations of the Scientific Paramilitary Inquiry & Tactics division of T.A.K.E, of which he was on loan from the United States. “I’m behind Lenore one hundred percent. I’ll love her the same.” Pidsby clenched his jaw. He stood. He leaned. His desk wasn’t that large. Tak and Lenore moved back a bit. Eye to eye he said the words that would, by whatever gods were available and listening, be those which saved mankind. “With you behind her, we’ll make sure these things get their full comeuppance. Godspeed, Agent Brazton.” ~~~ “We keep the zombies in cold storage,” she said as they raced to the elevator. Tak stabbed the button. Hard. Lenore swept a lock of red hair back in place. Hard. “Rex bit three other people before he ever got around to attacking me.” “Damn the secrets of lovers!” “What about us, Tak? Are there any secrets between us?” The elevator was slow. This could potentially be their last mission. “I’m not really circumcised, I just have hella foreskin control.” She deserved to know. Her eyes softened. “Thank you.” They waited quietly for the elevator. The elevator came. They raced to the zombies. The zombies were fricking hideous, and smelled, being mostly thawed. It would have to do. “Wrap them to go,” Lenore Tidsby, the fabulous scientist no man had yet tamed told the young science whiz in the wheelchair who had never learned to express his true yearning for an unbound life in any way outside of dissecting something. She felt sorry for him. Victoria in R&D had said she’d go down on him if he’d only asked. “But,” he wanted to caution Lenore, which was all he said because she slapped the hell out of him. “This is a global extinction Pandora level event, Potter. You load them in the truck and then call your mum. It may be your last chance.” “Yes, ma’am.” He wheeled around to Tak. “Agent Braz—” Tak slapped the hell out of him. “Man up. You carrying a weapon?” “No.” Tak slapped the hell out of him. “Here. First name ‘Last,’ last name ‘Resort.’ You understand me?” The young man fumbled his glasses from his chin to his eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said through tears. Tak felt a lump in his throat. This boy would never see a nipple on a Super Bowl commercial, then Tak mentally slapped himself. By damn’s early light, he’d make sure one way or another that that wouldn’t come to pass. Tak bent and hugged him tightly. “You live, dammit. You understand me? No matter what happens, we will come back. We will find you.” “I’ll be right here.” Tak man-hugged him again. “God-dammit!” “Ladies?” said Lenore Tidsby. “We’ve got a world to save.” ~~~ “So what, we just let ‘em bite people? There’s only three of ‘em.” A brain sprang through the air via its coiled prehensile tail and landed on the back of a woman screaming her way through a tangle of wrecked cars and dead bodies. Pincers at the stem held the spongy grey mass wobbling but firm so the tail could wrap around her throat and suck her neural juices. “Watch it!” said Lenore. “What?” “You almost hit the man screaming ‘What do they want?!’” “Dumbasses! In America we wouldn’t be running in the middle of the street where there’s a shit ton of alien brains with tails.” He shouted at the window: “How about you go the hell indoors and close the windows where shit can’t get you, asshole!” Two brains blindsided the man; he went down flailing. “Dump the zombies,” Lenore said abruptly. Thirty minutes in the car with him. Thirty minutes of him yelling at windows and snapping at her about his aggressive over-driving. “What?” “Just stop and dump the zombies! I am so—just dump them. Please.” “Fine.” “Fine.” “Doesn’t make you more of a woman to parrot me.” Tak pulled over. “Not more at all.” His finger hovered over the release button on the armored transport. Shit suddenly got real. He searched Lenore’s face. “Is this ethical?” “It’s the financial district. CEOs would be out for their lunch meetings. Their natural ravenous natures should work in our favor. Zombieism will spread quickest here.” That lock of hair had fallen again. Tak reached to tuck it. She intercepted his hand and put his fingers in her mouth, one brief, motivating suck and tongue stroke, then dropped the hand to his lap. “Future generations will forgive—” Tak kissed her, kissed her hard. She grabbed his button finger. “Do it.” They both pressed. ~~~ Six weeks later: “How the fuck are we fighting aliens and zombies now?! What the hell!” said the man on the street racing past the reporter and her sword-wielding camera crew. “Dammit, Tak!” shouted Major Pidsby. “It made sense at the time,” said Tak Brazton on the phone from his bunker in Honolulu. “Zombies are slow, they can be contained. Those little brain suckers were skittering around pretty quick.” “We’re going to have to go nuclear.” ~~~ They went nuclear. “Shit, fuck!” Pidsby said from his bunker. “Giant goddamn brain zombies with tails!” “Yeah, that sucks. Honolulu’s nice though. Zombies ate the brain aliens, we rounded all the zombies up, tossed ‘em in the ocean, sharks ate the zombies, we got zombie sharks, but who gives a damn, they’re sharks. All they do is eat anyway.” But Pidsby fell heavily silent. Then silent a moment longer. Too long. Tak braced himself for it. “They got Lenore,” he said, the fist up his ass twisting painfully. “She’s…she’s thirty feet tall with a tail coming out of her skull and a ravenous hunger straight from hell! Part of her is still Lenore. She’s managed to evade capture.” “Pidsby,” said Tak, pulling his favorite weapons belt from among others on the rack. “You’ve got to learn to get to the meat of things faster. I’m on my way.” ~~~ “You don’t want to kill me, Lenore,” said Tak, his weapon trained dead-center on her forehead. He’d known where she would go: the hillside where he’d first spotted her and Rex having outdoor sex when Rex was supposed to have been on a recon mission regarding mysterious sightings of fog people. After twenty minutes of watching them he’d wandered off to clear his mind and had come upon a rather large cave. They had apparently found it too. Condom wrappers and SPIT TAKE paraphernalia littered the interior. The red hair was patchy and matted, a piece of lab coat obscured one nipple, but other than that she was naked and, honestly, none too shabby. A prehensile, alien, spine-tail thingy moved about her neck and shoulders like the proverbial snake whispering secrets. She stank to high hell and lord knew what she’d been eating, but despite that she was still thirty foot, sexy, irradiated Lenore zombie. He noticed her bush had grown considerably into a sharp V that looked almost like a loincloth. And not every odor coming off of her was death and funk. He took a step back. She, a hesitant step forward, brow furrowed in deep and painful thought. Damn but she looked like Nigella Lawson thirty feet tall and dipped in tit sauce. But she was so primitive and not herself. Tak dug that. “Let me help you.” Then a pterodactyl flew down and carried him off. “WTF?! That’s how you’re ending this?” said Shapiro Headstein, zombie agent extraordinaire. “So you’re saying as a zombie-American writer that’s not authentic enough?” said the zombie with the cotton tee and salmon colored slacks. “I should have had some random zombie grab him from behind a tree saying ‘Brains’? Seriously, you tell me.” “I’m just saying.” “This is not a historical piece, Shap. Yes, the brain aliens came down and we ate the heads and gained—no, re-gained, our joi de vivre, but that story’s been told to death.” “How about we do a sex scene, end it on a romantic note? Beauty and the beast, King Kong.” “That’s where I was going with the pterodactyl!” “Where the fuck’s a pterodactyl come from in a movie about alien brains versus zombies, Mortie?!” “Fine, she screws him, uses him like a dildo, movie ends…or is it? Dah dah dummm, she could be pregnant!” “Mortie, there’s a reason your career is in the shits. It’s got nothing to do with you being a zombie.” Mortie sighed through his chest hole, which billowed his cotton tee out a bit. “I’m glad you told me that.” “Listen—” “No, I’m glad. I can go back to writing zombie porn, I’m ok with that. People still remember ‘The Undead Like Dick.’” “That’s a classic, Mortie. Fifty Shades breakthrough for the zombie set.” “My heart’s always been in film though, Shap.” Mortie snorted. “Hell, my hearts barely in me now, huh? Parchment paper chest, that sucker’s always threatening to fall out. Gotta keep oiled and moistened, you know?” “I know.” Shapiro stood to usher Mortie toward the door. “Sleep on it, Mortie. Ha, yeah, I know,” he said, heading Mortie’s joke off, “zombies don’t sleep.” “We’re nothing but idea factorys, twenty-four seven. I’ll work on it but I still want you to send this out as spec. I got a million of ‘em.” “Go home, Mortie.” “What if I get Tak deep in giant poon. Have an interior of him thinking ‘It’s not a dick, it’s a massive clit,’ and he’s working frantically to bring her to climax. Thirty minutes later he’s tired and near fainting…” “That sounds perfect Mortie, that’s just what we need.” “Don’t patronize, Shap.” Mortie left Shap’s office-slash-home. That’s how Shap described it to people. “My office-slash-home.” Fifty years ago, when the zombies and the Tau Cetans had their battle royal, everybody was yay zombies, yeah, go go, eat aliens… but that star faded. Folks were looking for fresh blood, but zombies had, what, one, two good stories in ‘em? Pretty soon he’d have to start dodging Mortie’s calls. Better to just lodge a machete in his skull. Shap took a sip of Tom Collins and pulled his vintage samurai sword down while trying to remember the last place he’d left his sharpener. Pterodactyl! Sweet Jesus, what was the entertainment world coming to?

Here’s the thing: don’t jump out an airplane without first making sure there’s no UFO under you, ‘cause those suckers will swoop on you in a heartbeat, and then there’s the butt probes, the nut ‘trodes, the nasal lubes, the ear drum licklers, the blind taste tests and the nipple surprise. I know this because I’m watching one insert things into me right now. Actually, not so much me. I’m the clone. Here’s what I see: in a bar fight, aliens would get their asses handed to them. Poor little grey Poindexters couldn’t beat a girl off a boy band, and I know boy bands ‘cause I used to be in one. I’m Trent Darcell. Any psychics picking this up will need to call the Enquirer on my behalf. Trent Darcell is not at an undisclosed location in Australia, no matter how they like to make jokes about ‘Outback Mountain.’ Stupid gay cowboy movie. Right now just about every orifice I have has something blinking sticking out of it, and I do not enjoy it in the least, so, no, Trent Darcell is not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. OK, so Seinfeld did that, but I make it fresh again. They look exactly like what everybody thinks, because that’s who’s been coming here the past umpteen years. They’ve got pictures lining the walls: Telly Savalas, ’78; Hugh Hefner, ’94; both Bushes George, ’98 and 2008 respectively; David Bowie, ’71, ’77, ’80, ’84; Monroe, ’58. Of course, a group photo with the King, ’92. Deal with it. They got people in pictures in French costumes, but those are probably people from the Revolution. Trent Darcell failed history. Marie Antoinette, Marie Osmond, what’s the difference? There’s some black dudes, there’s some Jap dudes, this scientist I swear I’ve seen before ‘cause he’s got this cool wheelchair and robot voice, like ‘I am Locutus of Borg,’ but more mechanical, and some old-school politicians. Like Nixon. I recognize him. These little grey fucks’ve been zipping earth forever, man, like they ain’t got shit else to do. Trent Darcell is supposed to be skydiving! Not watching Trent Darcell get anal probed ten times better than that faggot Diamond Lane. Little London prick says boy bands are dead; says Lip Patrol is a bunch of 40-somethings trying to project teenage anguish. Teenage anguish drives, man. Drives everything. Even little grey alien fucks have teenage anguish. Trent Darcell has a private air fleet. Little West End twit can’t say the same. I’m supposed to learn from watching Trent Darcell. From what I understand, clones are given this genetic blip so they can broadcast to each other sometimes, which is cool ‘cause I get to have sex with starlets and back-up dancers. Back-up dancers put out poon for the ages. There’s this one named Kimmie gave me head while I was burying the bone—tell me how that’s possible! He’s a lucky bastard. When they get tired probing for the day we’re popped in the same cell but separated by a clear half-wall it’d be too much trouble climbing over. Trent usually doesn’t feel like climbing anyway. “Rougher than usual today, man?” “Shut the fuck up.” Dumb ass called me Thing One when they dropped me out the vat and introduced me to him, so I call him Thing Two. How I came from somebody so stupid I’ll never know. “You cried today, man. You do every day but today was epic.” I waited. He didn’t respond. “You cried like a leedle—” “Shut up!” he spat. Literally. Our chronic shame was Trent Darcell was a wet mouth. Couldn’t give an interview without sharing saliva, so he licked his lips all the time because some of the black dudes did it and looked cool. “Listen, man, Spock (is that cool or what?) told me I’d be out of here soon, so maybe you wanna act like we’re fam and I pass along any messages, y’know?” “You’re a copy.” “You ain’t?” “Trent Darcell—” “Has never composed a melody, has never written, never read, can’t truly sing and certainly never thought in ways that are unique and amazing. Dude, my new brain is the shit. Check this out—” And I hit him with my latest song. I’ve got three albums ready to drop, in my mind. To do justice to them, though, I’ll have to go solo. So his mouth is hanging when I finish the a capella and do a sweet beat box fadeout on my chest. “Came up with that last night when you wouldn’t talk to me. Hey, didn’t mean to make you cry. That’s a beautiful song, ain’t it? You’d never have done that.” Spock just happened to be walking by. He gave me the thumbs up. My head bobbed with the appreciative nod. “All right. Look, man, it’s cool. I’m you, right, so it ain’t like you’ll be missing out. It’s a two point-oh world, man. I pod, I phone, I am. Hell, they might have some three-tittied Kirk chick out in space for you. I’m probably the one getting the short end. Earth, man.” I shrugged. “That’s like going down on somebody when their hotter sister coulda gone down on you.” He grabbed hold of a knob grafted to his chest. I saw the look in his eye. “Aw, man, don’t try that again. Spock? Spock!” He came padding back in that soft sissy-run aliens have. Spoke perfect English. “What?” he said. Like they’re not supposed to know English? Even Trent Darcell knows enough Spanish to order beer and get laid. I pointed. “Dammit, Trent, leave that alone!” Spock said. Spock looked at me. “He knows all that does is hurt him, right? You know all that does is hurt you, right? It’s not like that’s a mind control thing. It’s a shunt. OK? Leave it alone. We’ll need that tomorrow.” “Three-tittied women, Trent.” “Where?” said Spock, the little gill flaps under his chin puffing with excitement. Universal love, man. Little dude thought I might have found something in the library he hadn’t looked up yet. We were cool and all but I didn’t have time to humor him. Trent was about to do it. He yanked that port, screamed, fainted, sprayed blood on the way down, and didn’t wake up in time to see me off. First place I hit was Sydney ‘cause, hell, they were going to print it anyway. Appeared in a club at the downcrest of pumping and didn’t get recognized till I told these two ladies to get on stage with me and try to keep up. We did a half hour set straight out of Lip Patrol’s videos and the ladies stayed so synched with me people swore later the whole thing’d been choreographed. Trent Darcell doesn’t play instruments but I told somebody I needed a guitar, and wherever they found one at three in the morning I don’t know, but it was red, slick, and came with a fast-moving roadie who hooked me up and leveled me out so tight I hired him on the spot. I played clunky at first and hammed it up till I learned the sounds, then I played till 4 a.m., giving these lucky bastards half the glorious album I planned to drop next week. My dancers just stared slack-jawed at me. I think I had my picture taken more that night than my entire career. Camera phones stuck out like lighters to capture the ephemeral essential, which on the spot became the title of the album. The morning news said it all: Who IS Trent Darcell? When I left that club I got on a plane, got home to L.A., phoned my sky diving pilot who hadn’t wanted to be implicated in Trent Darcell’s likely death to let him know everything was cool. He was unemployed but everything was cool. I didn’t give a single interview, which drove them crazy. I pushed porn off the internet for almost an hour. Blogs, news, posts, searches. Who the hell was Trent Darcell, ‘cause no way was he the man from Lip Patrol. “Trent, you wanna take this call?” My roadie-manager-main man kept my guitar clean and my calls blocked. This one was on the private band line. Rang with our breakout song’s ringtone. “Girrrlllll,” boom boom boom boom, “slap my beats—” “With yo teats,” I adlibbed. “Put it through.” “Trent, what the fuck, man?” said Taylor. “Hell’s all this?” “What?” “Talent, motherfucker! What the fuck, you tryin’ to leave the band? Make us look bad?” He sounded like he was in tears. “We coulda made that album, man! I can’t even get on Leno now, man. I fucked Hilton last night and I can’t even get on Leno! Leno, you pasty bastard! Everybody wants to know how the hell Trent is suddenly popping off like a rabbit on Vialis! You’re the number three man, man, you’re the safe one! I’m the brooder, Tawan’s the black dude, Tommie’s the bad boy, you’re Trent: you know the steps and get the milfs. You’re the milf-man!” “Step into the light, brother,” is all there is to say. Band’s over. Mothers I’d like to fuck, huh? As of now, mothers and daughters better work tandem. “You can’t break up the band! Three’s don’t break up the band!” Ain’t nothing worse than a whining lead singer. “Taylor—” Wait. I’m picking up images, my hand gropes the air for comprehension, I’m frowning—“Gotta let you go,” and when I disconnect I drop the phone in the koi pond and sit to collect myself a minute. Canoli the Roadie of Doom waits ready to fiddle and adjust me as necessary. I nod him off. “I’m good, man. It’s a sunny day. Ogle groupies.” Canoli’s handsome enough to get laid on his own, but fly fishing within my sphere, hey, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for life. The two ladies lounging around my reflecting pool were pure Marlin, man. Too beautiful for relations without sprinklings of Darcell’s pixie dust. Tranced so deep now everyday was Never Never Land and Sydney, Australia was just a dream. I’m not sure what I saw but it felt like a man asking another man for sex with the kind of anticipation a kid saves for the end of a rainy day, then it was gone. It was weird. It made me sit in the sun for the rest of the day waiting for that sensation to come back. When it did, it was more like, like the electricity you get when you know somebody is secretly attracted to you and they ain’t half bad themselves. Got a hard on lasted three days. Fortunately my new groupies were in and of themselves medicinal arts. The new album had four songs that four different politicians picked up to prove they were hip and conscious. The Religious Right picked Onion Up Yours, can you believe it? But the bass line drove you down a gnomic path and the lyrics wouldn’t let you swing them one way to another. Lyrics were bad ass mofos that did your wife and looked you in the eye and said I’ma do you too. Right had been achin’ for some muscle for years. Canoli had a fit but I told him be cool. I didn’t own the music. Nobody owned the music. It was a dove. “Yeah, man, but this is what it sounds like when doves cry. Stupid politicians.” “Brother, they’ll lodge onion so far up that ass they won’t help but be exposed.” We studied with yogis. Secretly funded coups to get rid of African despots and get food to their people because, y’know, damn. Got to sit in on high-level policy talks about national healthcare and, let me tell you, that’s some sticky air. Humid as a bastard with too much money and not enough hair. I released the next album two months later. Called it The Reinvention. Thirty-six damn songs and not a single throwaway. Hailed by critics worldwide as the first ever Great American Novel set to music. I became so huge I became small. I could walk into restaurants without getting mobbed because anybody who truly listened to The Reinvention knew that fawning shit wasn’t cool. Canoli even got to riff on that one, a few acoustic interludes tied in timbre to the theme. Again, teach a man to fish. He’d wanted to riff his whole life. I told him to go electric but he said no, he wanted to slow it down a little. After he released his album, Roadie of Doom, we celebrated like crazy. Bono had done the rooftops; The Beatles had done the rooftops; even Lip Patrol had done the rooftops. But when me and Canoli did it we took it to the stars. To the stars. My red guitar and his tan acoustic on top of a squat parking garage, downtown Detroit. Why Detroit? Because something the little alien dudes put in the water there makes Detroit rock! Windsor across the water was pissing themselves because they couldn’t see. Through the whole concert I picked up imagery from at least a hundred clones on the four-sided clog below, black dudes, business dudes, yuppie dudes, dick dudes, pussy girls and trampoline artistes, every one of them humping up on whosoever was in front of their pants because you don’t get to watch your host being probed without developing a healthy taste for it yourself; and because everybody was groovin’ anyway and I’d learned to play my jams as if I was fingering labial lips. Trent Darcell brought the freaking sixties back. I swear to God somebody got penetrated when I kicked in the slow jams. Hell, if I closed my eyes I wasn’t sure if I was playing the guitar or my boner. All I knew was Detroit was about to experience the greatest orgasm it’d ever had two hours after this crowd dispersed. Mogasm. Detroit rock city. Me and Canoli hung around the Westin Hotel lobby after that in these glass towers the people still call the Renaissance Center but the suits call the General Motors Headquarters. The car gods bought it, the car gods name it. Renaissance Center. I like it. Gleaming glass towers that look like glass spiders should live there, and at night, at night it’s like being in space. A billion lights travel across it. A billion lights sit fixed. A billion lights wink off. If you’re lucky you’ll catch someone undressing after partying the night. There’s another high-rise hotel directly across the street. God bless fake invisibility. So we got bored, went to my room, left the lights out and perused one such angel in bra and jeans brush her hair, search her suitcases, and finally, finally, pop that clasp after fifteen minutes. Breasts as supple as fresh doughnuts. Wrote a song about her. Then I threw it away. It took six months for me to look my first clone right in the face. He said he’d been wanting to reach me for some time but, y’know, wife, children, responsibilities. It was David fucking Bowie. The Thin White Duke himself. The coolest person on the planet. Ziggy Jehovah Stardust. We met at Pink’s, signed enough autographs to buy a few minutes quiet time, and ate two of the most unhealthy, ambrosiatic hot dogs ever will be. By then the sun was setting. Smog refraction makes California sunsets kick the ass off anywhere. “D’you know why they haven’t mastered faster than light travel yet?” Bowie asked in that cool, clipped accent of his. “Not a clue.” “Because it can’t. Been proven how many times? I mean, it’s why Einstein did all that bother with his relatives. Their ships don’t travel faster than light. Too much distance. No distance in time though.” “Why’d they come here?” Bowie smiled at me. “They never left.” That one blue eye of his and that one dilated eye of his hid all kinds of secrets of the ages. This man hadn’t written Rock and Roll Suicide for no reason. I kinda hoped for some serious exposition but he just shook my hand and said, “Helluva album. Keep considering time, luv.” Keep considering time. I told Canoli I was a clone that very night. He’d just finished restringing my guitar and had plunked himself in the studio to tune it. Canoli could’ve been a pope in another life. He had that kind of gravity. Told him the whole story, how I was really just a copy of a silly, trendy man. Canoli scratched at that little piece of goatee directly under his lip, letting the universe swirl around his head before he flushed it all in with the black hole of thought. “So we become these little grey fucks, huh?” He put his medicinal weed down. Wasn’t sick but why wait to fight the odds? “You guys here to save the world?” Don’t be stupid. Of course he didn’t believe me. Not like people believe in Krishna or Jesus. He was just smart enough to take a good look at the other side. “Not all clones are stars, man,” I told him. He twanged the first of four chord progressions. I picked up his guitar, closed my eyes. I followed his jazz. Took a single hit off his weed. In a flash I’d analyzed it down to its chemical composition and realized why most people will never make the Dream Time: they’re too afraid to go to sleep. Weed, Xoloft, Xanax—it won’t take you there. Can’t. What was it Bowie wrote? Something about Time taking a cigarette; something about it putting it in your mouth. You pull on a finger, then another finger, then cigarette. Something about the wall to wall is calling but you don’t linger ‘cause you forget. Something about everybody being rock and roll suicides. Next time I see Spock I’ve got some questions for his anthropology-major ass. Canoli wanted to know how we became grey shriveled fucks. “You wanna call your next album The Clone Wars?” he said. “Nah, been done.” Canoli did a change up I didn’t see coming. I coughed a little bit. He stubbed out his weed. I smiled. I strummed chaotic like a butterfly for a few, but I caught up. “You be ready next time?” he asked me. So we both took it for granted that they were coming back for me at some point. “Hell yeah.” I was armed with the wisdom of the ages. How cool is that? Bowie’s song played on. Fame was in how you handled being alone.“…just turn on with me ‘cause you’re wonderful. Oh, give me your hands. Wonderful…” Give me your hands. You’re wonderful.